Sub menu

Support Sen. Markey’s Effort to Ban Robocalls

According
to some estimates, Americans received 48 billion robocalls last year, up from
30 billion in 2017. It used to be that only a person’s land line would be
subject to telemarketers, but these days our wireless phones also are being
deluged on a daily basis with these annoying phone calls from robocall centers
that typically operate from overseas.

The
latest nuance in the robocalling game is spoofing, whereby a robocall
essentially hijacks a local phone number, tricking the receiver of the phone
call into thinking that the call is coming from someone in one’s hometown.

No
one is immune from the scourge of pre-recorded robocalls trying to scam us out
of our money. And the calls seem to never stop coming. The deluge of these
robocalls have become the number one complaint of Americans who have a phone
line — which is to say, just about all of us.

Robocalls
have become an epidemic that must be stopped and to that end, U.S. Sen. Ed
Markey has introduced a bill, known as the TRACED Act, that will give
authorities and the telecom companies the ability to find, catch, and prosecute
scammers.

The
TRACED Act gives the FCC the authority to levy civil penalties against
scammers, extends the window from one to three years to take action against
intentional violators, and requires telephone providers to adopt call
authentication technologies to verify that incoming calls are legitimate.

This
bill already has overwhelming bipartisan support — one of the few things that
Republicans and Democrats can agree upon these days — and recently passed a
Senate committee by a 26-0 margin.

Each
of us can show our solidarity behind ending the scourge of robocalls by calling
Senator Markey’s office to become a citizen co-sponsor of the TRACED Act.

Let
our elected officials know that the sooner Congress takes action, the better.